La terza caratteristica fondamentale della nuova economia riguarda il lavoro; la sua natura e quindi il suo significato. Mentre noi siamo impeganti nei decreti attuativi del Jobs Act, in sé senza colpa, il mondo ha iniziato a domandarsi se il tifone che ha devastato etichette discogafiche e case editrici, su tutti, si stia abbattendo su ogni forma organizzata di servizi e produzione.Chi ci guadagna? Pochi, molto pochi.
In effetti si moltiplicano le forme di aggregazione destinate a facilitare la vita del mondo dei freelance.
Se infatti dimenticassimo per un attimo il teorico aspetto liberatorio ed equalizzante e ci soffermassimo sulla realtà quotidiana potremmo dover ricoscere una situazione molto diversa da quella anedottica. “The Post-Ownership Society How the “sharing economy” allows Millennials to cope with downward mobility, and also makes them poorer, by Monica Potts”.
Senza arrivare ad affermazioni ultimative come questa di Crunch Network “In the Future, Employees Won’t Exist” Posted Jun 13, 2015 by Tad Milbourn (@tadmilbourn) secondo il quale “Contract work is becoming the new normal. Consider Uber: The ride-sharing startup has 160,000 contractors, but just 2,000 employees. That’s an astonishing ratio of 80 to 1. And when it comes to a focus on contract labor, Uber isn’t alone. Handy, Eaze and Luxe are just a few of the latest entrants into the “1099 Economy.” si potrebbe però osservare che il “40% of America’s workforce will be freelancers by 2020” secondo “a study conducted by software company Intuit in 2010. That’s more than 60 million people.”; al punto che è nato anche il primo sindacato dei freelance che, in pura logica post Internet, è molto di più, senza tralsciare le critiche di fondo al concetto di Innovazione legato alla Sharing Economy Innovators are killing us: Instead of reinventing housing or transit, they bring us companies like Airbnb and UberInnovation leaves structures intact, developing new processes to monetize the dysfunctional systems we already have.
Sul tema del capitale, la riflessione contemporanea più fondata si trova però nel libro straordinariamente documentato e di grande acume di Piketty, Thomas. “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
“The overall conclusion of this study is that a market economy based on private property, if left to itself, contains powerful forces of convergence, associated in particular with the diffusion of knowledge and skills; but it also contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.The principal destabilizing force has to do with the fact that the private rate of return on capital, r, can be significantly higher for long periods of time than the rate of growth of income and output, g.The inequality r > g implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the return on capital varies directly with the size of the initial stake and that the divergence in the wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale.
“The problem is enormous, and there is no simple solution. Growth can of course be encouraged by investing in education, knowledge, and nonpolluting technologies. But none of these will raise the growth rate to 4 or 5 percent a year. History shows that only countries that are catching up with more advanced economies—such as Europe during the three decades after World War II or China and other emerging countries today—can grow at such rates. For countries at the world technological frontier—and thus ultimately for the planet as a whole—there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1–1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted.1With an average return on capital of 4–5 percent, it is therefore likely that r > g will again become the norm in the twenty-first century, as it had been throughout history until the eve of World War I. In the twentieth century, it took two world wars to wipe away the past and significantly reduce the return on capital, thereby creating the illusion that the fundamental structural contradiction of capitalism (r > g) had been overcome.
“To be sure, one could tax capital income heavily enough to reduce the private return on capital to less than the growth rate. But if one did that indiscriminately and heavy-handedly, one would risk killing the motor of accumulation and thus further reducing the growth rate. Entrepreneurs would then no longer have the time to turn into rentiers, since there would be no more entrepreneurs.The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital. This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instances of primitive accumulation”
“The difficulty is that this solution, the progressive tax on capital, requires a high level of international cooperation and regional political integration. It is not within the reach of the nation-states in which earlier social compromises were hammered out. Many people worry that moving toward greater cooperation and political integration within, say, the European Union only undermines existing achievements (starting with the social states that the various countries of Europe constructed in response to the shocks of the twentieth century) without constructing anything new other than a vast market predicated on ever purer and more perfect competition. Yet pure and perfect competition cannot alter the inequality r > g, which is not the consequence of any market “imperfection.” On the contrary. Although the risk is real, I do not see any genuine alternative: if we are to regain control of capitalism, we must bet everything on democracy—and in Europe, democracy on a European scale. Larger political communities such as the United States and China have a wider range of options, but for the small countries of Europe, which will soon look very small indeed in relation to the global economy, national withdrawal can only lead to even worse frustration and disappointment than currently exists with the European Union. The nation-state is still the right level at which to modernize any number of social and fiscal policies and to develop new forms of governance and shared ownership intermediate between public and private ownership, which is one of the major challenges for the century ahead. But only regional political integration can lead to effective regulation of the globalized patrimonial capitalism of the twenty-first century.”To be ”